"Yeah," I said. Hopkins was looking at the tattoos on my forearms. I was wearing a sweatshirt, and I had the sleeves shoved up to my elbows. "I broke down, and this gentleman was nice enough"
"You got any ID?"
"Yeah." I watched him as I slowly reached for my wallet with my left hand. Hopkins was not theatrical about it, but he got ready for me to do something rash. He rose up on the balls of his feet, looking like he was hoping I would take a swing at him. I got the feeling then that if Hopkins and I had met in a bar, one of us would definitely have had a bad night. Maybe both of us. I came up with my wallet, fished out Emmanuel Williams's license, and handed it to him. He glanced from the picture to my face.
"Wait here for one minute, please." He left me standing there, went back to his car, and talked on the radio for a minute. Back in the Jeep, I could see Louis mouthing the word "asshole." Nicky's eyes went from me to the cop and back. I winked at him, but he missed it.
Hopkins didn't find anything on Manny, Manny was cool. He came back and handed me the license. "Do you mind if I take a look through yoah cah? You have a right to refuse permission, and if you do, we will all wait right heah for a search warrant."
I watched the muscles working in the side of Hopkins's jaw. I reached into my pants pocket for my keys, handed them to him. "Knock yourself out."
He looked at me, reached around behind him for something on his belt. It was my turn to bristle. No way this cocksucker is putting me in cuffs. He seemed to think about it, then change his mind. "Wait over here by the cruiser," he said.
"All right."
He walked up to the passenger-side door, glanced back at me, then went to work. Back in the Jeep, Louis was shaking his head in disgust, but I was beginning to sweat. Suppose whoever owned this van before me left a roach under the seat? Then it hit me. I had a hundred and twenty grand, more or less, wrapped up in a paper bag in one of my duffels. There might not be a law against it, but there's nothing I can tell this bastard that will keep him from slapping those bracelets on me and taking me and Nicky to some police station until he's satisfied I'm nothing more than a rich guy who likes to keep a lot of cash around, and not a bank robber. Or a burglar.
I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid.
I didn't even need the money. I'd been doing pretty well, as burglars go, and I had never developed the sailor-on-payday mentality that a lot of crooks get. I had a little better than thirty-five thousand bucks in a bank account in Emmanuel's name, and I could access it through any ATM. I had taken the cash out of impulse, and now it was going to cost me. Maybe everything. I could see them sticking me in a cell, I could see Nicky, confused and losing hope, thrown back into the state machinery that would slowly grind him down, turning another lost child into someone like me.
How could I have been such an idiot?
Hopkins finished with the glove box, the console between the seats, the space under the front seats, and he moved on to the passenger compartment. All right, the guy is armed, he's ready, and he looks tough, but I can handle him. Fuck, I have to handle him. When he gets to the bag the money is in, I'll jump him, and then I'll cuff him and leave him in the cruiser, I'll take Louis's keys, I'll grab Nicky and we'll take off. I'll dump the van in Machias, right, boost a car
.
The van doesn't work, Einstein.
Okay. I'll never get far in Louis's truck. I'll cuff Hopkins, leave him with Louis. I'll toss Louis's keys into the woods, steal the cruiser. You can't leave Hopkins with a gun, either. Oh, this is great, man, this is fucking brilliant. But what choice do I have? I'm not losing Nicky, not after all this.
All right, I'll bribe Hopkins with the money. That's got a chance. What can the guy make, thirty-five, forty grand a year? It's cash and it's good, take it and drive away, buddy
. He might go for it. If he doesn't, though, I've just made him a lot more difficult to handle, he'll be expecting me to make some kind of move. Fuck it, I can still handle him. I better be able to handle him
. Okay, grab the police car, dump it in Machias, hope nobody notices an inconspicuous motherfucker such as myself, with a kid, driving a police car, leaving it someplace, stealing another car. Hey, it might work. And then what? Head for the Canadian border, maybe. If I remember the map right, we've gotta be about an hour from Calais, which is the first place you can cross. Maybe two hours. Do I have two hours? Louis or Hopkins might be able to walk to a phone in that time. And the van is registered in Emmanuel's name, so if they get to a phone before I get across, I'm fucked. How about if I head for Ellsworth instead? I could dump the second car there, boost another one, head west instead of north, but now I don't have a good ID anymore, so I'll have to forget about Canada. Shit.
There was nothing in the passenger compartment, so Hopkins moved back and opened the rear hatch. Three bags, two of mine and Nicky's knapsack. Which one was the money in? I couldn't remember. I glanced back at the Jeep, felt Nicky's eyes on me. Hopkins grabbed one of my bags and unzipped it. I could feel my heart picking up speed and my mouth went dry. I got ready. Hopkins turned back to me, a condescending smile on his face. He had something in his hand.
"What the hell is this?"
I could barely talk. God, if you're there, I owe you one, man. Another one. "It's a spotting scope," I croaked.
"What's it for?"
"I'll show you." Hopkins stepped to one side. I wiped my hands on my jeans, hoped they weren't shaking too much. I fished my tripod out of the bag, set it up, mounted the scope. I sat on the end of the van, scoped the far end of the field across the road from where we were parked. "All right," I said. "Take a look."
I moved out of the way, and Hopkins peered through the scope. "What?"
"Red-winged blackbird."
He straightened up, looked at me, incredulous. "You got this thing for looking at birds?"
"Oh, yeah. I also got a digital camera that mounts onto it. Say I got a bird I can't identify, okay, I can capture the image of the bird, download it onto my laptop, then compare the image to
Sibley
. That way"
"
Sibley
? What is a
Sibley
?"
I reached into the bag, pulled out the fat hardcover edition.
"Oh," he said. I could see the transformation in him. I was no longer a threat to his manhood, I wasn't a tattooed ironhead freak itching to find out if I could kick his ass, I was an eccentric, a harmless dork. A bird-watcher. "How much did all this crap cost you?"
"The scope was about eight hundred, the camera was about a grand. I don't remember what I spent on the tripod. Then, you know, there's books, binoculars, not to mention the cost of trips and stuff."
He stared at me for a minute. He shook his head once. "All right. You can put all of this stuff away, Mr. Williams. I'm going back to have a word with Louis Avery." He walked back to the Jeep.
I broke the scope and the tripod down, stuck them back in the duffel bag. The paper bag with the money in it was at one end of the bag, underneath some shirts. My hands were shaking again as I thought about how close we had come to disaster. Stupid, man. No matter how careful I try to be, I still do something moronic at least once a day
. I got everything stowed, then turned and sat on the tail of the van and watched Hopkins back at the Jeep. Louis was wearing an expression of distaste. Hopkins, looking at Nicky, asked questions. Nicky, a true son of Brooklyn, looked at the floor and either shrugged, shook his head, or gave one-word answers. Attaboy, Nicky. Don't tell him shit. After a while Hopkins got tired of it and came back up to the van.
"Well, Mr. Williams," he said, not looking at me, "I'm sorry for taking up yoah time. We've been having a lot of problems with the drug traffic in Washington County. I thought maybe I'd gotten lucky." Hopkins avoided eye contact, looked like he despised apologizing, but someone must have told him he had to do it.
"Drug traffic? You're kidding me."
He shook his head. "Nope. I spend more time on OxyContin than just about anything else."
"Oh, yeah. Hillbilly heroin. I heard of that."
"I wish I hadn't," he said, and a little bit of that short-guy resentment came back into his voice. "Enjoy yoah time in Maine," he said, and one corner of his mouth lifted in what I would consider a sneer. Another time I would have called him on it. I don't like unfinished business. Prison had given me this attitude, you know, you got a problem with me, let's work it out right now. I didn't say anything, though, I swallowed it. You got away with one stupid mistake, I told myself. Don't make another one. Hopkins got back in his cruiser and fired it up, shut off the lights, pulled a U-turn, and drove away. I carried the bags back to the Jeep.
"What a jerk," Louis said when I got back in. Nicky climbed back into my lap.
"Yeah," I said. I was flooded with relief. I didn't care about Hopkins. You've got to be smarter, I told myself. You came this close to losing everything.
Louis went on, oblivious, shouting over the noise of the Jeep. "Ya know, the trouble with a fella like that, ya give him a nickel's worth of authority, right away he wants to hit somebody with it." He squirmed in his seat, warming to his subject. "Bookman says Hop is the smahtest officah he's got, and he might be right about that, but Hop is too much of an ahshole to be walking around with a gun, you ahsk me."
"Who's Bookman?"
"County sheriff. Hoppie married one of the Pottle girls, but he smacked her around once too often and she run off to New Hampshah, left his sorry ahss. Now theyah ain't a female up here with any sense will go out with him, he's gotta do his laundry by hand. Serves him right."
"He said he had to go through all that back there because you guys have been having trouble with drugs. OxyContins, he said."
"Ayuh," Louis said, "well, that much is true. My wife, Eleanor, is on that stuff. It's the only thing will handle the pain spells she gets. Costs me almost two hundred a month. I've bought houses for lower payments than that. And ya practically need an escott when ya got to pick it up, because of how many addicts being so desperate for it. Probably don't cost the drug company squat to make it, either. Anyhow, ya run across Hoppie again, wise man might keep an eye on him. Don't call him Hoppie, neither, unless yo-ah ready to do battle. He don't like it much."
* * *
Louis made a right turn off Route 1 onto a small two-lane road that meandered more or less westward along the bank of something too big to be a stream and too small to be a river. The surface of the water was still, with patches of green lily pads here and there. The forest beetled down close upon the water on the far side, mostly fir and spruce. On the side we were on, the woods were mostly hardwood, the leaves long gone except for the brown oak leaves that were hanging on stubbornly. Here and there you could see an evergreen, stark against the bare branches of its neighbors. Even the trees self-segregate, I thought. They're most comfortable with those like themselves, except for the occasional odd duck who insists on living far away from his relatives.
Louis braked, downshifted to second, and turned up a steep gravel driveway. "I really appreciate your doing this, Louis."
"Nothing to it," he said. "Used to be a motel 'bout fifteen miles noth, but she burnt down a couple yeahs back. Hate to see anybody get stuck, so far away from home, with no place to stay. Besides, you can give me a couple days' rent on the trailah."
"It's a deal."
There was a tall yellow house on the knoll at the top of the driveway, high narrow windows, peeling paint, front porch with no railings, two sheds appended single file to the back of the house, connected to a large barn of weathered gray wood spotted here and there with touches of red paint. You could see through the side of the barn and out the back because some of the siding had been removed and a few of the beams were gone, and the back third of the structure looked like it was thinking about laying down.
Louis opened his door, paused. "Mrs. Avery ain't been out of the house in a long time," he said. "She loves company, other than mine, mowah than just about anything in the world. You'll be doin' me a favor, give her another couple sets of eahs to chew on for a while." He winked at Nicky. "Besides," he said, "yo-ah son ought to get a taste of country living while yo-ah up heah. Do him good."
There was a tall oak tree in the side yard. Two blue jays were flying in and out of it, calling to each other raucously. I took a couple of steps over and watched. I didn't see any other birds, just the jays flapping around and making a racket up where the first big branches of the tree met the trunk, about twenty-five feet from the ground. There was some bird shit around the base of the tree, though, and a little furry gray ball, maybe half the size of a golf ball. Nothing exotic about blue jays, but in my mind they are no less beautiful for being ordinary, brightly colored, opportunistic, fearless, and smart. Louis saw me looking.
"He out?"
"He who?"
"Scritch owl," he said. "Lives in a hole up in that oak. Jays get all upset when he comes out in the daytime." He walked over, shading his eyes and peering up into the tree. "Don't see him," he said, "but he's hard to see, anyhow. Feathers just the color of tree bark, he blends right in. That ought to tell you what business he's in." He kicked at the little gray ball. "Hocked up a bunch of mouse hair and bones." He looked at me and grinned. "That's the way to do her," he said. "Swallow yo-ah dinnah all at once, then just heave up what don't agree with you and be done with it."